Many companies and associations pool wireless minutes by purchasing minutes in bulk and distributing them to their employees or members. Today, the billing in a group that pools minutes is determined using one of two calculations. The first option is a cost-per-device (or average cost) calculation. In the average cost calculation, each mobile phone is assigned a cost based on the average cost for the whole program. For instance, suppose Company A has 3,500 devices in its wireless program and after pooling Company A's minutes and plans, the total monthly bill for Company A is $175,000. In order to determine the average cost for Company A, the total cost ($175,000) is divided by the number of users (3500) to arrive at a cost-per-device of $50. As a result, each division of Company A would be responsible for $50 per device with a line of service. Unfortunately, the average cost option can result in disassociating usage patterns of end-users from the cost of the program. With no financial consequence, end-users may use more minutes than they ordinarily would use if they were being charged based on usage.
The second option is a cost-per-minute calculation. In a cost-per-minute calculation, users are billed based on the number of minutes used on their device. Generally, this is calculated by dividing the total program cost by the total number of minutes, then this number is multiplied by the usage of each device or the usage by each division of a company for the month to arrive at the total charge for a device or division, respectively. Unfortunately, the cost-per-minute option does not account for the basic costs of maintaining a line of service so there is little incentive to cull low-usage lines from the program.
Many wireless programs also include options for their users to add text-messaging or data plans to their phones. Such options are considered non-pooling features because these options can only be used on a particular phone and are not shared among all users. Today, these charges are typically lumped into the total bill so that every user must pay a share of every additional non-pooling feature.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a system, method, and computer-readable medium for rebilling that allows for customizing the pricing model by integrating both the average cost calculation and the cost-per-minute calculation and applying the costs of non-pooling features only to the corresponding device that utilizes such features.